UPDATE: So I have decided between billymays11111's post thats on top OR Pudding36's post in which I commented saying I was leaning towards. Could you guys take me home with this? So thankful for all the help. Some of it is confusing so doing my best here. Thank you all again.

Hello!

I am really bad at this. I made a post on some other part of Reddit but I forgot my password and can't find it. I am trying to help my BF get his gaming house in order. He plays a game called Global Offensive. And he has a computer that can't run the settings very high. He complains about it and I want to show him that I am able to share in this place with him. He is actually clueless about computers (car guy), and so I thought I would turn to the male verison of pintrest for help!

I have about $400. My question is..should I upgrade what he has? Buy him new parts? How can I get him to betting settings

In that post I was told to install BAdvsior. I don't know how to upload my results so I tried to get each "part" of the computer. Can you guys please help me? I tried to google all night with no luck? In Reddit's Mercy.

I've included everything besides a hard drive, He can just swap his current one into this new case and it should work fine. His current setup scores about a 2000 on 3dmark while this setup will run at about 4000 (This data was from 3dmark search and PCpartpicker benchmarks so it could be anecdotal.), The motherboard I have chosen uses the LGA 1155 socket which has tons of room for improvement, He may need a bigger power supply though if he plans on upgrading the video card.

What billymays11111 did was create a whole new build for your BF. If you buy all the parts in his post and put it together (if he's a car guy he should be able to figure out how to put a computer together as it's rather simple) he'll be able to play the game he wants no problem.

On top of that this new build has a lot of upgrade potential meaning that in the future if your BF wanted to upgrade say his CPU or GPU (processor or graphics card) he could do it with relative ease though to upgrade his GPU in the future he might need to buy a new power supply along with it.

Well if you are referring to the HIS video card in the chart "HIS" is a manufacturer of video cards, A brand name. Your guy currently has a HD 6700 series and the one listed is a HD 7770. He will basically have a brand new computer except for the hard drive which stores all of his data, If you want a new hard drive it will cost a little bit extra. But he will have two separate working computers.

It happened to me, and from what I had researched it is fairly common. Luckily I have partition on my HDD with a fresh install of windows but still could be pretty annoying. It doesn't happen 100% of the time or anything, but still something to be aware of. I did swap out mobo/cpu/gpu/ram all in one go. I was also using an HP desktop and swapped stuff into my new case, just keeping the HDD because it was pretty decent, and so I didn't have to buy a new copy of windows. Maybe HP specifically has 'safeguards' against messing with hardware, that kind of thing, but who knows.

Long story short, just something to be aware of because if this guy is swapping over his hard drive from his previous computer, I am guessing it is from some sort of large computer company (HP/Dell etc)

I would stick with his current graffics card. The 6770in my build (coupled with a i5 3570k), although not optimal, plays many games like CS:GO and skyrim at max settings with vsync locking it to 60fps permanently. If you kept with his old card then you could spend more money on a better processor and then upgrade his gpu to something much better later on.

This is all assuming that its a 6770 and not a 6750 or some other 6700 series variant.

EDIT: can you clarify if the 6700 card was added later, or was part of the pre-built system? If it was part of the pre-built system you can probably ignore what follows, if the earlier comment about it being an integrated chip is correct...

People suggesting an upgrade of your 6700 series card to a 7770, I think are a little off, but they're most likely assuming it is a shoddy version that came with the computer originally. The general rule with video cards is it's only worth upgrading if you are going up 3 'tiers' or more, and I think the 7770 is only one or two steps up at most. The 6700 cards aren't too shabby at all, as others have said it's the CPU/motherboard holding you back.

My suggestion would be to look into building a new rig, leaving out the hard drive and video card (recycle them from the old machine). Take the other suggested builds here as a base for what you will be putting together, and 'ring it up' on pcpartpicker.com. Click the 'reddit markup' button on pcpartpicker when you have your parts selected, copy/paste the text from there into a new 'build help' post here, and include a link to this thread.

Including a new video card in the new build isn't a bad idea, but as I said, in my opinion you're better off reusing the old one, and focusing the funds into a basic system that will better support a future upgrade to a significantly better video card.

You've done great so far, push on a little more and you'll definitely have a very stoked BF :)

A quick google search leads me to think the it's a 6700m video card (basically a cheap integrated card) which also looks like it has shared 1gb RAM.

Unfortunately what you have is a prebuilt system, and there's very little that you could try to upgrade because it has a poor cpu and probably has a barebones psu to boot.

In terms of $400 you could go for a 5800k apu with a 7770 gpu. You could salvage a few things from your current computer, such as HDD, maybe RAM (although it's so cheap there's not much point) and optical drive.

You're better off just submitting a request for a new build with $400 price point, or even use BaPC search and see plenty of other cheaply suggested build or use the sidebar. Remember to supplement a few things from your current build as mentioned above, with such a low budget you don't want buy parts you already have and lose out on cpu/gpu performance because of it.

Very nice of you, also great work obtaining his PC specs for the original post.

Here's the online store page for CS:GO, your man's game. The page lists some system requirements. This store is run by the company that developed the game, so it's probably the best source for this info.

Honestly, his Processor/Video Card/Memory seems plentiful for the game, but perhaps it's not enough to maximize all the visual options that he desires to.

If I had to throw blame at something, it would probably be the video card or maybe even the motherboard. Neither of which I'm an expert on, but the video card info you listed is so vague, it might be some exclusive OEM model (made just for Dell machines, for example). Usually if you buy a pre-built computer, they'll give you just a "good enough" graphics card unless it's marketed as a gaming machine.

Motherboard is what every other computer component plugs into, so if it's the weakest link, it will bottleneck performance of everything else.

Personally, I think going with intel at this price range is a bit ridiculous. This build will be slower than most of the other builds here, but it will play games MUCH better. Now, if you want to save some money, you wouldn't have to get the graphics card, and then it will play games about as well as anything else here, but for ~$100 cheaper. If you go the route of not buying the card, then i would suggest a better CPU cooler like this one or this one. Also, his current OS may not work with the motherboard without reinstalling it, so unless you have the disc for it, buy a new one.

I suspect that the problem that he is having is that his processor is bottlenecking the gpu. Upgrading your processor can be problematic. If you could find out what screen resolution he is playing on, it would be easier for us to identify if there is a bottleneck / which part needs to be upgraded.

If the problem is the cpu, then you will need to install a new, 64 bit copy of windows. You would do well to buy more RAM. I suspect this is the case because a 6700 should be more than enough to play csgo on a lower resolution. We will need to see pictures of the inside of his case to know what kind of motherboard would fit.

If the problem is the graphics card, I would get him a radeon hd 7950 for about $300 and a 120 gb solid state drive or a 700w psu for about $100. The rest of his computer is not particularly powerful so the 7950 wouldn't really shine even if the graphics card is the issue, but a couple months from now, if you could spend another $200 on a processor upgrade, he would be able to run any game he wants at high settings.

Why so much for a CPU? Might as well get a 8350. This is why they made a whole review comparing both processors. I highly doubt they will ever upgrade the video card. The CPU (both of these actually) are a complete waste of money. Better off getting a Phenom II with a bundled MB and some RAM with enough for a nice video card. The build with the Pentium higher is actually perfect too.

Honestly either one would work. But OP's BF sounds like the kind of guy that doesn't upgrade very often so he might as well spend on something he's going to have for a few years before it becomes a problem again.

A netburst CPU is going to bottleneck anything. Netburst is weaker than my Opteron 165 at 2.7ghz and two 4870s in crossfire were completely bottlenecked.

For $400, you're not going to get a good CPU + mobo + ram + graphics card upgrade. You have to choose between CPU + MOBO + RAM or Graphics card, and considering a graphics card is going no where with a netburst CPU, getting rid of it is the best choice.

I watched a video on some one benchmarking the shit out of the 8130 (maybe?), and it performed on par with the i7's if not better. I tend to stay out of the AMD vs Intel debates because of the simple fact, I like intel and did all my research there. I'm very happy with my Xeon, and won't recommend a product I have very limited information on, and haven't touched since the K6

You can debate the whole thing forever. It really just depends on what benchmarks you use. But it's always been like that, even in AMD's K8 prime.

I've found that saying bad things about low end Intels in here gets you down votes. There's a lot of angry kids with Pentium Gs and Core i3s that spent a bunch of money on their rigs and get crappy performance in some games.

They are just really bitter and downvote like crazy. I find they're the kind of people that look at bar graphs of single or dual threaded benchmarks, compare i3 to 3930k, see they're about even, and go, "lol I'm getting the same performance as a hex core for like a fourth of the price!"

I've pretty much alternated between Intel and AMD as long as I've been building PCs. The only rig I ever owned that I really detested was my Pentium 4 Prescott build. Everything else (earlier P4s, Opteron 165, Core i7 920, FX 8350) were great CPUs. I just go with whatever offers good value and is good for what I'm doing. I do a lot of rendering and texture baking and use Blender, so custom compiling Blender to use all the fancy AMD FX instructions and the FX 8350 multi-thread performance was too good for me to pass up. But I still suggest Intel sometimes and AMD others.

But what are you gonna do? There's always going to be ravenous fanboys to eat your karma.

I'm running G640 on my WHS2011, runs everything just fine, 2 active terminal sessions no issue, with DHCP/DNS enabled and have it acting as a file server. Gaming on the G640 is absolute garbage though. I have another debian server that can handle apache, terminal services, and 2 VM's. One of XP the other Backtrack, it's slow as hell to load but once its up and going it's solid. The ironic thing, I have 2 ass processors running a couple of servers (using the word server loosely), and for my gaming rig I have a Xeon 1230v2, nothing stops this thing.

AMD has Phenom II x4 3.4 GHz for like $99.99 and I wouldn't skimp on the GPU, get him the 7850, about $100.00 more but it's the best GPU for price per performance.

The GPU should be 7850 though no matter what, anything else is up to you. The Phenom II x4 outperforms that overpriced shitty i3. If you want me to quote you a better setup let me know I can do it for you. Might shave off a few dollars and help buy that 7850.

When the ATI 5770 came out it was a big jump in a budget GPU build PC, but 6770 and 7770 are garbage; not enough of an increase to really continue investing in that budget line. 6850 and now 7850 are the new budget kings.

I have no idea about NVidia stuff by the way so I can't comment.

Update: About to eat so if you didn't order those parts yet I'll put together a budget DDR3 AMD Build for you. I have no knowledge of Intel/NVidia so maybe someone can provide you with that experience. Back in a few.

You clearly need to study up on benchmarks and your hardware. 6770 is no where even close to being nearly as good as a 7850. I'll never recommend x770 to anyone, not even my worst enemy. Only exception being when 5770 came out it was quite a jump in performance for budget GPUs. But if you're buying a budget card right now, 7850, best performance per dollar; this is the card for you. AMD should discontinue the x770 line, it's just a disappointment.

There's a few things here too... I went with a cheap SSD for the OS his favorite game and a few applications. His soon to be old computer, he'll have to take out the old HDD for storage, the optical drive, video card and re-use the OS. My builds are based on personal experience, from trial and error and will only recommend parts I know work, and work well.